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When Raymond Mendez showed up at his million-dollar home in Upper Marlboro early on June 16, the house was already reduced to blackened rubble from a fire that raged through the home, and firefighters were pumping water from a nearby swimming pool onto the house.

"When I got out here there was nothing left," Mendez said. "I don't normally break down, but that day I did. I cried for hours. I mean, it was home."

Mendez's street is part of the rural tier, a county designation for 150 square miles of southern Prince George's, that largely does not have access to fire hydrants, said Prince George's Fire/EMS Department spokesman Maj. Derrick Lea.

Lee Havens, the chief of the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department and the incident commander for that fire, said fire trucks with 750-gallon water supplies were on the scene in about four minutes. Responders called out water tankers — trucks that carry between 3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water — that were on the scene about 12 minutes after the 911 call was received, he said.

Responders also had to go on "shuttle runs," where firefighters drive to nearby fire hydrants, water tanks or ponds to get more water, Havens said. He said responding to fires can be harder in areas without hydrants, but he added that firefighters are trained for such situations and said the fire on Stan Fey Drive was so intense that responders would not have been able to save the house even if hydrants were there.

"It was pretty much gone when we got there," Havens said.

The Prince George's County Fire/EMS Department could not provide response times or other information about specific fires, so it is not clear whether response times are slower in areas without hydrants.

Francis Winterwerp, the deputy chief at the Baden Volunteer Fire Department, which is in the rural tier, said he has been on calls where the lack of available water meant firefighters could not save a house. He said it often takes half an hour to get a steady water supply at a fire.

"It increases the amount of manpower needed. You have one contingent fighting the fire while you have a whole other contingent bringing the water," he said. "Had there been a better water source in [rural-tier developments], the losses would have been less."

Larry Armstrong, the vice president of the Prince George's County Professional Firefighters and Paramedics Association and a former engine driver at the Baden station, said he thinks developers should be required to install water tanks in housing developments they build in the rural area.

In the rural tier, "you might have to go five or six miles to get water," he said. "If you're in the city, you might have a couple of minutes without water getting to you. Here, you might have 15 or 20 minutes."

A Public Safety Facilities Master Plan drafted by county planners in 2008 said the lack of a water supply is "consistent with the [county's] long-term growth management policy" to prevent excessive development in the rural area. Instead of extending water lines, the plan called for the construction of 20 30,000-gallon water tanks throughout the area.

Two of those tanks have been built in the past year, and a third is under construction in Baden, said Lea, the Fire/EMS Department spokesman. The county has also provided four water tanker trucks to south county stations and helped build a number of "dry hydrants," pipes that stick out of ponds and other bodies of water, which give responders easier access to water, he said.

The county also plans to begin construction on a new fire station between the Brandywine and Baden stations south of the town of Upper Marlboro, a project that is expected to begin in the next six months, he said.

Mendez said he does not know whether fire hydrants would have saved his home, but he said he wished they were on his street.

"It seems like there's separate rules," Mendez said. "We pay a lot in taxes. We pay more in taxes than a lot of [other] people do. But we don't have a lot of the conveniences."

E-mail Greg Holzheimer at gholzheimer@gazette.net.